Chương 72: Epilogue

When Evan woke up the next morning, he needed a moment to catch up with the events of the previous day. The room he'd spent the night in looked larger by day than it had at night. Wooden floors, covered with dusty carpets, polished wooden wall panels covering stone walls. A large desk on one wall, a large four-poster bed on the other, and a big arched window in between.

He climbed out of bed, put on his last set of clean clothes, and quietly prayed the laundry facilities of this place had enough mana left to wash his clothes, because he didn't want to meet those eleven people currently populating his demesne with the blood- and muck-crusted tunics he'd worn yesterday. The rest of his friends and some of the freed prisoners, including Felix, were already up, and they had put together something akin to a breakfast buffet in the dining hall.

"What do you say?" Oliver asked, stuffing himself with a small, round pastry that looked like a muffin but pink.

"Do we go out today to take a look at those villages? We should probably put together some kind of to-do list to figure out which repairs need priority."

"We should do the same for the house itself," Catriona said, drinking a sip of Mari juice from a decorated ceramic cup.

"We haven't even entered half the rooms. We should start with the storage rooms. Do an inventory and find out what we need to buy to sustain us. We're staying here, right?"

"At least for a while," Evan said, while Luca handed him one of the pink pastries. He already looked so much healthier than last night. Healing magic was really something. Back on Earth, it would've taken him surgery and months of rehab to recover from a head injury this severe. In this world, it only took a potion and a good night's rest, and Luca was as good as new. Evan wolfed down the pastry, then stood up again. Oliver looked up at him.

"Ready to head out? Or storage rooms first, like Catriona said?"

"Neither." Evan turned to Benedict, who was currently busy refilling a plate with scrambled eggs.

"Benedict, can you show me the room where the Professor stayed?" Benedict looked surprised, but nodded.

"Sure. I've never been in there, but I know where it is."

"Then let's go right away." Catriona put down her cup.

"Are you hoping to find hints of his whereabouts?"

"That's what I'm hoping, yes."

"Do you want us to come with you?" This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

"No, it's fine. If we find anything at all, it's probably just the scrambled writings of a madman. I doubt there was much actual reason or logic behind his sick experiments." Benedict looked somber.

"If there was a reason, I never figured it out. All he ever achieved was pain and suffering." Evan and Benedict left the rest of the team to finish their breakfast and headed upstairs, to the third story of the building.

"This is where the guest rooms are," Benedict explained as they walked down a hallway.

"The rooms are smaller, but for some reason the Professor didn't want one of the main rooms. Maybe he wanted to stay away from the Beasts. They, of course, picked the biggest, most luxurious rooms in the entire building."

"Do you know his real name?" Evan asked.

"No. I asked, but he refused to say. Everyone just called him the Professor." Benedict stopped in front of a door.

"This one. This was his room." Evan took a deep breath.

"I hope we don't find anything too gruesome in there. I've had enough body horror to last me a lifetime." He pushed the door open and found an extremely ordinary-looking room behind it. It was smaller than the one Evan had slept in, and the furniture was simpler, but there was a comfortable bed and a large desk with several drawers. The bed was made, but the layer of dust that covered almost everything inside the estate was missing, telling Evan someone had slept in that bed recently.

He lifted the lid of the trunk that stood at the foot of the bed and peeked inside.

"Nothing, just clothes and a spare pair of boots," he told Benedict.

"Let's move on to the desk." The desktop was just as orderly as the bedsheets and the folded clothes inside the trunk. There was a stack of empty parchment on the left side and a row of books, sorted alphabetically by the title on their spines, on the right side of the table. Evan picked up the books one by one and flipped through the pages. They seemed to be magical theory textbooks. Filled to the brim with essays about spells and skills, and complex diagrams explaining mana flow and gemstone interactions.

He put the books down with a sigh.

"I'll need more time to go through these."

"I'm not sure it's worth the effort," Benedict said.

"This is very advanced magical theory. I bet there are only a handful of scholars in this country who could understand what's in them." Evan looked at the books with furrowed brows. He thought about Julia, the teacher at Orva's Academy in Stormhaven. She'd been very friendly to Evan and had offered him her help, but these books were probably far removed from her area of expertise. Maybe it was still worth a shot.

If the subject matter really was as complex as Benedict claimed, she had a better chance at deciphering the content than him.

"I have some connections to the academic world. Maybe I can show them the books." He pulled open the first drawer and took out a thick bundle of parchment. These had notes written all over them. Hand-drawn images too, unfortunately. Evan only skimmed over the documents, but it looked like the Professor had documented the results of his experiments in great detail. One entry caught his attention, though. There was the word "Failure" written under the summary of an experiment.

The ink strokes looked thicker and darker, as if the Professor had used a little too much force when he wrote the word. Next to "Failure" was another word.

"Blightforge," underlined with a heavy stroke and with three exclamation marks behind it. Evan showed the page to Benedict.

"Do you have any idea what a Blightforge is?"